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From: roelofs@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Ender Wiggin)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: PKZIP 1.10 availability
Keywords: PKZIP
Message-ID: <6780@amelia.nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 17 Jun 90 05:11:48 GMT
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 30

In article <878@stsim.ocs.com> glenn@stsim.ocs.com (glenn ford) writes:

>Why is it not available via BBS? I have it on my BBS.

Since, technically speaking, it's illegal to export the regular version of
PKZIP 1.10 outside the US/Canada (it contains encryption technology, which
is a Bad Thing to export), some BBSs may choose not to carry it in order to
protect themselves from legal action by Uncle Sam.

>                                                      The PC Week article
>did not test using ZOO, which has been around for ages, which i thought
>was surprising. They also did not test using LHARC which is public domain
>and comes with complete source code AND has better compression than pkzip
>in *most* cases. It's as usual. People doing these "benchmarks" are
>way behind on whats going on.

It is too bad they chose to ignore ZOO, since it's available on the widest
variety of operating systems; on the other hand, it's quite slow and has 
only mediocre compression, so it's perhaps not such a great loss for a PC
magazine to pass over it.

LHARC, btw, is NOT public domain, at least as of the last version I saw; the
Unix version is copyrighted by Yooichi Tagawa, and I'm pretty sure the PC
version is as well.  It is free, however.  And it's been my experience that
PKZIP almost always manages better compression, although the actual archive
may end up larger (especially if it contains many small files) due to the
greater amount of overhead PKZIP stores (pathnames, comments, you-name-it).
The two programs are generally within a few percent of each other, though.
And, of course, if you're working on a Unix system, LHARC is infinitely more
efficient. :)